“I’m alone in my head/Always disconnected,” confides Keely Dowd, vocalist for Grün Wasser, in their debut music video in advance of their full-length album Nein/9, which will be released this fall on Chicago’s Automatic Recordings. Speaking to Jesse Pollock, programmer and synth player for the band, he explain that “the idea for the video came into being while exploring abandoned places in the city. We wanted to juxtapose life, longing, and the ideas put forth in the music with desolation, and blur the lines beyond it all.” In the refracted and diffracted images relayed through a camera lens, this feeling certainly comes across. If the video seems confessional or personal, that’s because it is.

Orchestrated and directed by Keely and Jesse, “Out to Lunch” is an ode, or an elegy, to disillusionment and betrayal. It makes Chicago, in all its cold, opaque grandeur, look alien and dangerous, but it also takes pride in the city. To withstand a Chicago winter is to be tough and to choose to keep withstanding it year-after-year is an act of courage. And when this summer comes to a close, at least we’ll have Grün Wasser’s industrial rhythms nudging us closer together while we dance.